Galicia, A Sentimental Nation: Gender, Culture and Politics

Introduction

When did we become sentimental? Colonial stereotype, national discourse and gender in Galicia and Spain

The historical moment of political action must be thought of as part of the history of the form of its writing.

Homi Bhabha (1994)

Limítase a miúdo a cultura galega a umha versom adaptada da difundida por Espanha. (Galician culture has often been reduced to an adaptation of the version disseminated by Spain.)

Maurício Castro (2000)

The word ‘nation’ has never been too distant from a reference to sentiments. From Ernest Renan’s definition that ‘A nation is … a great solidarity, constituted by the sentiment of the sacrifices that its citizens have made’ (Renan, 1896a: 81), to Benedict Anderson’s idea that nations are imagined political communities commanding ‘profound emotional legitimacy’ (Anderson, 2006: 4), the link between national identity and the world of affects has been a common constituent of modern thinking in this area. For the particular historical and geographical focus of this book – Galicia, a non-state nation in north-western Spain, from the late nineteenth century to the present day – the conjunction between the national and the sentimental has had particular historical significance. Beyond the definition of nations as communities joined to a great extent by an emotional bond, or of national belonging as a powerful affective experience, the national question in Galicia has been conditioned by a further association between sentiment and the body politic, which has crystallized in the historically recurrent myth of Galician sentimentality. As will become clear in the course of this book, the trope of Galician sentimentality as a marker of national identity has appeared repeatedly in modern representations of the region, its language and its people, forming a continuum that extends throughout the textual and visual corpus on Galician history and culture from the late nineteenth century up until present times. Its manifestations are as varied as they are historically complex and engrained, but they concentrate on the assumption that Galicians are a nostalgic people, living in harmonious communion with their landscape or yearning for its beauty if away from it. Both implicitly and explicitly, these images have evoked a millenary link between Galicians and an innate capacity for poetry and an aloof humour, a way of being in the world that is both impractical and unrealistic, but also astute and reserved. Such imagery appears entwined with discourses on the nation and the multiplicity of ideologies they serve, but also invariably with a gender politics. Thus, the trope of Galician sentimentality has bifurcated into different representations of Galician men and women, giving rise to a network of stereotypes evolving over the extended historical period of Galician national construction, from the first nationally aware movements and writings in the mid-nineteenth century to the diversity of national discourses positioned within and against Galicia’s current status as an Autonomous Historical Community in the Spanish state. Images of Galician masculinity have therefore fluctuated between those of the valiant Celtic warrior and the lachrymose man, whilst traditional representations of Galician women have tended to depict them either as raunchy and immoral or as examples of self-abnegation and grace. Pervasive as they are, these images have seldom been treated as historically grounded in the matrix of national narratives that converge in the Galician context, and even more rarely, if at all, have they been investigated as discursive formations arising from Galicia’s colonial condition. This book intends to be a first step in this line of research.

As has been the case with much scholarship in contemporary Galician studies, this study is indebted to Xoán González-Millán’s analysis of Galicia’s subaltern position within Spain and its history of cultural resistance. Particularly in his book Resistencia cultural e diferencia histórica: A experiencia da subalternidade (Cultural Resistance and Historical Difference: The Experience of Subalternity) (2000), González-Millán worked towards a theoretical framework for cultural historiography in Galicia that put Galician culture’s subaltern condition centre stage, thus foregrounding resistance as a distinguishing feature of Galician cultural politics and production. Following the work of Sherry B. Ortner, González-Millán’s proposition was groundbreaking for the Galician context, in that it promoted an understanding of cultural resistance not as a protective discourse bent on the preservation of a presupposed original, national quality, but as a reactive and dialectic network of discourses, responding organically to dominant forces often in contradictory ways, both productive and counterproductive. A seldom acknowledged function of resistant cultural forms is, in González-Millán’s own words, that their study can lead us to a ‘diagnóstico do poder’ (a diagnosis of power), rather than to the teleological goal of empowerment and emancipation (2000: 131). Resistance, he concludes, should be analysed not as ‘unha calidade de determinados actos ou políticas, senón como unha loita incesante coas estratexias do poder que están en constante transformación’ (a characteristic of certain acts or politics, but as a tireless struggle against the strategies of power, which are in constant transformation) (2000: 134). This dialectical logic of cultural resistance helps us understand discourses of the nation in Galicia as a semantic body that cannot be studied in isolation from other adjacent national discourses or from the power dynamics informing their interaction. As a consequence, although this relational frame of study has seldom been pursued in Iberian Studies, Galician cultural history and the discourses of the nation underpinning it cannot be adequately investigated without a keen eye for the diversity of often antagonistic discourses of the nation developing in the peninsular context, including Spanish and Portuguese nationalisms, state centralism and its associated anti-Catalan, anti-Basque and anti-Galician discourses. A consideration of the historical power dynamics undergirding such interactions sheds substantial light on the origins, development and persistent currency of some of the metaphors of Galician cultural nationalism. This book centres upon one such metaphor, that of Galician sentimentality, and will argue that its history and contemporary circulation cannot be dissociated from the asymmetrical power dynamics informing the colonial relationship between Galicia and Spain.

González-Millán’s theory of cultural resistance in Galicia as a historically dynamic interplay of forces helps us bring into the same analytic space national discourses developing in Galicia and Spain. However, it is the theoretical framework provided by postcolonial and Orientalist forms of cultural critique that has assisted me with the question of representation. It is no coincidence, as Edward Said paradigmatically showed in Orientalism (1995), that colonialist discourses have been so extensively reliant on the practice of representation and portrayal. Because of its dual function as both projection and self-reflection, the praxis of representation is also a politics. Moreover, when framed in the colonial context, representations of the colonized serve the two-way purpose of legitimization and control, generating a body of knowledge aimed at perpetuating the unequal power structures that sustain the subjection of certain populations under others, a body of knowledge that is, for this very reason, repetitive and monotonous. This is partly why the concept of ‘colonial stereotype’, already present in the work of Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, and influentially elaborated by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994), becomes instrumental for any understanding of cultural interactions in contexts of political oppression and domination. I take as a starting point Bhabha’s theorization that the colonial stereotype, itself one of the fundamental rhetorical techniques of colonial discourse, does not simply concern ‘the setting up of a false image which becomes the scapegoat of discriminatory practices’, but functions rather as:

a much more ambivalent text of projection and introjection, metaphoric and metonymic strategies, displacement, over-determination, guilt, aggressivity, the masking and splitting of ‘official’ and phantasmic knowledges to construct the possibilities and oppositionalities of racist discourse. (Bhabha, 1994: 117)

The function of the colonial stereotype both as a tool for colonial subjection and as a space for oppositional resistance is thus facilitated by its structural ambivalence as a political trope. In Bhabha’s own terms, if the colonial stereotype can be taken as one of the key mechanisms for the ‘production of knowledges in terms of which surveillance is exercised’ (101), it is also the object of a certain anxiety of appropriation, internalized by the colonized through a fetishistic investment, in their struggle towards liberation. The trope of Galician sentimentality provides us with an eloquent example of how the idea of the colonial stereotype and its defining ambivalence has also been relevant for the context of Spanish and Galician national politics. As we shall see, the genesis and historical unfolding of the image of Galician sentimentality cannot be extricated from the interrelated processes of the Galician national awakening and Spanish state centralism, with their respective interruptions and crises, but also their mutual permeability. It is for this reason that the rhetorical and metaphorical use of the image of Galician sentimentality can be found in the vast array of cultural and historical artefacts produced by the competing discourses on the nation arising in Galicia and Spain from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, often serving different, yet interconnected, political objectives that cannot be understood simply in terms of an antithetical play of oppression and resistance. As we shall see in the course of the book, we shall come across the image of Galician sentimentality again and again in the competing discourses of Galician apolitical regionalism emerging in the late nineteenth century; in the politically aspiring nationalist movement developing in the 1920s and 1930s; in the discourse of cultural nationalism that developed during Franco’s dictatorship after the legacy of pre-war political nationalism had been estranged from the project of national reconstruction; and, of course, in the overarching discourse of Spanish state centralism taking root in several Galician-based discourses of the nation, particularly in the neo-regionalist discourses upheld by the conservative Popular Party of Galicia (the PPdG). In all these discourses, as we shall see, the trope of Galician sentimentality can be understood as an ambivalent colonial stereotype used by the dominant position seeking to disarticulate an insurgent national culture whilst facilitating a space for its controlled difference. However, it has simultaneously been of use to the oppressed national culture’s programme for self-differentiation and expression, often in ways that collude with the dominant discourses and aims.

The recurrent discursive image of Galician sentimentality is a prime example of the colonial stereotype in yet a further sense, and one that was adumbrated by Frantz Fanon’s stark theorization of national cultures under colonial domination as ‘contested culture[s] whose destruction is sought in systematic fashion’ (Fanon, 2001: 191). While the colonial stereotype’s ambivalent structure allows for a politically versatile combination of ‘desire and derision’ (Bhabha, 1994: 96) which is differently exploited by dominant and insurgent positions, the network of associated values elicited by the stereotype is often aligned with meanings that have been negatively connoted in a hegemonic politics of representation. Hence recurrent explanations of what Fanon called the ‘constitutional depravity’ of the colonized (2001: 32) systematically refer to traits such as their congenital incapacity for logic, their sexual degeneracy and their spiritual insensitivity to transcendence, where such markers are understood as devalued by a Eurocentric logic of bourgeois morality and capitalist imperialism. It is in this framework that the identity marker of sentimentality emerges as a negative trope related to inadequacy and lack. Two bodies of critical work have helped me formulate the link between colonial discourses and gendered politics of representation, which forms the theoretical basis of this book. First, gender critiques of Orientalism such as those by Sara Mills (1991), Regina Lewis (1996) and Meyda Yeğenoğlu (1998) have demonstrated that processes of colonial ‘othering’ have seldom been separated from sexual politics, whether it be through the different uses and gratifications that men and women who invested in – or were subjected to – imperial discourses were able to effect, or in the almost systematically gendered rhetoric informing such discourses, thereby rendering the political stakes of the colonial narratives more multilayered. A central argument underlying this body of work, as well as my own, is that ‘representations of sexual difference cannot be treated as [a] subdomain [of Orientalism]’ but must be regarded as ‘of fundamental importance in the formation of a colonial subject position’ (Yeğenoğlu, 1998: 2). Second, in parallel with this line of research, the conflation of gender studies and cultural historiography has given rise to a solid body of work tracing the gradual semantic deterioration of the notion of sentimentality, which went from functioning as the desired token of civilized refinement and sensibility in eighteenth-century central Europe to being a marker of poor aesthetic value, widely associated with a particular type of narrative genre developing in late nineteenth-century Western literary traditions, directed to a growing market of women readers and focused mainly on female characters. The work of the feminist scholar Suzanne Clark has traced how the trope of sentimentality in cultural production has fulfilled the double function of promoting ‘a stereotyped and normalizing emotional responsiveness that both defined the value of feminine discourse and trapped women within it’ (Clark, 1994: 97), thereby sealing the binary distribution of reason and emotion as two hierarchically gendered spaces. Thus sentimentality is aligned, on the one hand, with images of the undeveloped, uncritical or infantilized mind, and, on the other, with low qualitative value, especially in processes of aesthetic canonization. As the work of Andreas Huyssen has influentially shown, ‘the persistent gendering of that which is devalued’ was a central discursive strategy for turn-of-the-century Western intellectuals, at a time when the anxiety of contamination between high and low, mass and elite forms of culture was becoming a staple of the times (1986: 53). The semantic devaluation of sentimentality as a feminine trope occurring in cultural discourses of this period serves as a prime example of such reactive positions: if coupled with the processes of national awakening and struggle within and against European state apparatuses also emerging at this time – from the British Isles to Spain – we see how the trope of sentimentality emerges as a feminizing colonial stereotype, of particular strategic value against national insurgence movements that were seen as a challenge to still unstable state politics.

I shall add another theoretical viewpoint to this introductory discussion, before I turn to the historical account of how the trope of Galician sentimentality became a double-sided canvas on which both the discourses of Galician national awakening and anti-peripheral Spanish state centralism were inscribed. For, if sentimentality underwent a process of semantic deterioration through feminization that was useful for the preservation of modernist cultural hierarchies, it is no less true that in colonial/national contexts the trope of sentimentality found its political actualization in the image of the sentimental – and therefore feminized – Celt. As postcolonial critics of English imperialism such as Robert C. Young and Janet Sorensen have shown, the feminization of the ‘Celtic’ fringes became a recurrent trope in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century national discourses in the British Isles. The image of the feminized Celt functioned doubly as a discursive tool with which to estrange the subsumed nations of Wales, Ireland and Scotland from English power centres, but also as a means of debilitating their potential for full-fledged political nationhood. In her study of how linguistic practices and theories in eighteenth-century Britain reveal the range of politically motivated representations of the various conflicting national variants (English, Scottish, ‘British’, etc.), Sorensen did not fail to acknowledge the centrality of gender in imperialist power play (Sorensen, 2000). From the feminization of the Welsh-inflected language of the working-class characters in Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (Sorensen, 2000: 106), to representations of ‘a disempowered and feminized’ Scottish Gaelic as connotative of a ‘beautiful but defeated state’ in John Clark’s preface to The Works of the Caledonian Bards (190–1), Sorensen traces how British imperial cultural strategies were awash with references to the ‘Celtic peripheries’ as feminized, in an attempt to prefigure their ‘political quietude’ (Sorensen, 2000: 29). Such were the cultural and political underpinnings of European Romanticism’s interest in Celtic subjects during the nineteenth century, and its unsurprising political crystallization in those cultural contexts – England, Ireland, France, Spain – where different forms of state nationalism had to grapple with internal national movements for which the claim of a distinct Celtic heritage had become instrumental. Forming a rhetorical continuum that went from the Brittany-born historian Ernest Renan’s 1854 essay ‘La poésie des races celtiques’ (‘The poetry of the Celtic races’), to its translation into English by William Hutchison (1896b) and Matthew Arnold’s influential relaying of its main tenets in his 1910 essay ‘On the study of Celtic literature’, the gendering of the Celt as either objectionably sentimental or overly excitable was of a piece with the sort of ‘sympathetic imperialism’ with which Celtic revivalist movements such as those emerging in Ireland and Wales in the late nineteenth century had forcefully to negotiate their claim for national status (Howes, 1996: 43). The pervasiveness of the image of the feminized Celt, as Robert C. Young has argued, thus became ‘part of a knowledge which has no distinct source or centre, but which a whole range of writings, from history to science, all repeat and reaffirm with an authority drawn from its very ubiquity’ (2008: 45). That the trope of the feminized Celt became something of a truism among cultural and political commentators in late nineteenth-century Britain and France is a sign of the heightened political convenience of that very image, at a time when the threat to national unity coming from the ‘Celtic peripheries’ was gathering momentum.

While the trope of the feminized Celt has been placed under historicizing scrutiny in critical assessments of British imperialist culture, from feminist and postcolonial perspectives (Howes, 1996; Young, 1995: 55–89; 2008: 40–70), the issue of Galician celtismo has never been approached in Iberian studies from a postcolonial perspective. To date this has meant that no study has explored whether Spanish centralist discourses have capitalized on a similar use of the feminized/sentimental Celt trope, as part of the discursive negotiations used in internal national conflict. This comes as a surprise, given that the issue of celtismo has been so pivotal a force in the history of Galician national insurgence, and one that Spanish centralist discourse has undoubtedly had to deal with throughout the modern period as both a historical and a political construct. This critical void further illustrates that postcolonial approaches to Spanish history have tended to focus on Spain’s ‘non-European ethnic and racial traditions’ (Santaolalla, 2002: 55), particularly on the role of Moorish and Jewish cultures in the history of the formation of Spanish national identity (Martin-Márquez, 2008; Fuchs, 2009; Flesler, Linhard and Pérez-Melgosa, 2011). As a result, there is little historical and cultural analysis from a postcolonial perspective of the discursive formations arising from the political tension between hegemonic Spanish nationalism and insurgent Catalan, Basque or Galician nationalisms, which have historically struggled for greater autonomy or total independence from the Spanish state. The present study makes a first research contribution in this vein, with a focus on the Galician/Spanish context, for which the question of Celtic sentimentality has been of overriding importance.

From rugged to soft: Galician sentimentality and national discourses in the late nineteenth century

The myth of Galicia’s Celtic origins, for all its engrained iconicity in modern discourses of the nation in and about Galicia, is a relatively recent conception. The association between the north-western territories of the Iberian Peninsula and Celtic populations was indeed part of a historiographical continuum present in classical and medieval historical sources on the Iberian Peninsula, which through an amalgam of etymological and ethnographic assumptions had brought the populations of Galicia and Gaul under the same genealogical family. Both in Spanish and Galician historical works, the idea that Celtic peoples had settled in the Iberian Peninsula, and in Galicia particularly, was well established and widespread, but it was not until the nineteenth century that Galician historians would start treating such historical accounts as a basis for the construction of a Galician national identity. Texts such as José Verea y Aguiar’s Historia de Galicia (History of Galicia) (1838), which is conventionally considered the first one to promulgate the theory of Galicia’s Celtic origins as a foundation of its historical difference, had not appeared in a vacuum, but were engaging with the French tradition of historical interest in the Celts (represented in the texts of eighteenth-century historians such as Paul-Yves Pezron and Simon Pelloutier) and with the response they had elicited among historians of Spain such as the Catalan Juan Francisco Masdeu (Pereira González, 2000). I am not interested in the process whereby the theory of Galician Celtic origins, and its nineteenth-century historiographical elaboration known as celtismo, became a central allegory for Galician national narratives; this process has been widely studied in both historical and literary analyses of the period (Axeitos, 1993, 1997; Barreiro Fernández, 1986; Renales Cortés, 1996). I shall focus, rather, on a less frequently discussed discursive movement, which concerns the gendered imagery accompanying the historical association between Galician national identity and the Celts. Put in succinct terms, I am interested in what political stakes may have been involved in a line of discourse that went from mid-nineteenth-century depictions of the Celts, and therefore of Galician ancestors and their latter-day counterparts, as a valiant, violent and bellicose people, to later characterizations of Galicians as quiet, nostalgic and sentimental also precisely because of their Celtic origins. This transformation from bellicose to sedate, I will argue, has enjoyed a currency that is still to be found today in cultural representations of Galicians, and has had far-reaching implications, as we shall see, for men’s and women’s differentiated investment in Galician national discourses.

Leandro de Saralegui y Medina’s work Estudios sobre la época céltica en Galicia (Studies on Galicia’s Celtic Period) (1867) is an example of what could be termed a ‘pre-sentimental’ period of Celtic discourses of national identity in Galicia. Establishing from the outset that ‘no es posible, al ménos sin aventurarse mucho, asignar á Galicia una población más antigua que los celtas’ (it is not possible – not, at least, without making rash assumptions – to claim an older ancestry than the Celts for the Galician people) (Saralegui y Medina, 1867: 6, emphasis in original), the author embarks upon a theorization of how Galicia’s Celtic origins should be taken as a matter of national pride, historiographical biases notwithstanding. A central source of such pride, as developed in the text, is the brave and heroic nature of Galicia’s Celtic ancestors, which also functions as an explanation for their customs and overall way of life. Thus, in the face of scarce historical sources, Saralegui affirms that ‘Teniendo en cuenta el espíritu belicoso de esta raza, su condicion batalladora, y la rudeza de sus costumbres, es fácil presumir que la caza y la guerra serian constantemente la ocupacion de nuestros aborígenes’ (Bearing in mind the bellicose spirit of their race, their belligerent character and harsh customs, it is easy to assume that the main occupation of our first ancestors must have been hunting and war) (1867: 14). Referring interchangeably to the Celtic populations in the North-Western regions as ‘gallaicos’ (Gallaic peoples) (19), ‘los celtas gallegos’ (the Galician Celts) (20) and ‘nuestros mayores’ (our elders) (38), Saralegui’s text places the emphasis repeatedly on their bellicose nature and, more crucially, on their desire and capacity for territorial protection. ‘Los gallaicos’, he asserts, ‘se hallaban por efecto de su atraso social fuera de las leyes internacionales, y unida esta circunstancia á sus hábitos de feroz independencia, constituia un obstáculo poderoso á toda transacción pacífica con ellos’ (The Gallaic peoples, owing to the backwardness of their society, were outside international laws. This, combined with their habits of fierce independence, made any peaceful dealings with them truly difficult) (19). Saralegui’s account of the clash between Phoenician invaders and Celtic populations is a good example of how early versions of Galician celtismo were bound to the rhetoric of warfare and force, which thereby linked the inaugural moments of Galician national construction to the idea of fiercely defended historical difference:

al desembarcar en nuestro territorio, arrastrados por la presciencia de sus grandes riquezas, debieron encontrar una resistencia desesperada por parte de los naturales, cuya agreste rudeza hacia muy difícil entrar en tratos ni aun en comunicacion con ellos. Debió, pues, haber un choque rudo, formidable, entre el pueblo invasor y el pueblo indígena, entre el fenicio que llegaba y el celta que resistia con la fiereza indomable de su raza: choque violento, terrible, de qué la tradicion nos ha conservado el recuerdo en la simbólica lucha de Hércules y Gerion sobre las costas de nuestra pàtria. (1867: 19)

(after disembarking on our territories, driven here by the foreknowledge of its wealth, they must have confronted a desperate resistance from the indigenous populations, whose rugged spirit made it truly difficult to begin negotiating or even communicating with them. A formidable, cruel clash must have ensued between the invaders and the indigenous peoples, between the Phoenician newcomers and the Celts, who resisted with the full indomitable fierceness of their race. A violent, terrible clash, whose memory has been preserved in the symbolic fight between Hercules and Geryon on the shores of our fatherland.)

Saralegui was claiming explicitly that Galicia’s origin as a nation was rooted in a heroic defence of its difference and autonomy, made possible by the Celtic people’s innate adeptness at war. It is for this reason that the historian’s account of the Roman invasion of the north-western regions of the Iberian Peninsula is explained in openly colonial terms, with recourse to the vocabulary of subjection, domination and resistance. Interestingly too, the historian posits that the bitter memory of Roman enforced rule over the ‘Galician Celts’ is a central part of Galicia’s inherited lore, as well as a constant reminder of their original sovereignty and self-sufficiency. His description of how the Galician character is naturally averse to foreign interventions can be read as an important formulation of Galicia’s colonial condition in the nineteenth century. Importantly too, the theory of Galicians’ Celtic ancestry acts here as a historical reminder of the threat of future division and separation:

La población indígena, si asi podemos llamarle, aquella parte de la gran familia galaica en quién vive como perpetuada la primitiva raza céltica, conserva aun hoy, como parte de su carácter, un sentimiento de repulsion hácia todo lo extraño, hacia [sic] todo aquello que no ha heredado de sus padres y que no ha sido santificado por la tradicion. Y esa particularidad, propia del carácter gallego, tal vez no es otra cosa que un resto del antiguo odio á la soberbia Roma, ejemplo vivo del perpétuo anatema que reserva la historia á las grandes iniquidades y á los sangrientos atentados contra la independencia de los pueblos. (1867: 58)

(The indigenous people – if we can thus name that part of the great Gallaic family in which the primitive Celtic race lives on – still displays today, as a part of its character, a sense of repulsion towards anything that is foreign, anything that has not been directly inherited from its parents and sanctified by tradition. And this particularity of the Galician character is perhaps nothing less than a trace of that ancient hatred towards proud Rome: a living example of the perpetual curse that history reserves for the gross injustices and cruel attacks executed against the independence of peoples.)

One final point needs to be added to this delineation of a pre-sentimental period of Galician national historiography, and this is the one that concerns the politically loaded association between Galicians’ capacity for poetry or lack thereof. Colonial representations of Galicians as inept at poetic composition had emerged and become widespread from the early Spanish modern period: Lope de Vega’s adage ‘Galicia, nunca fértil en poetas’ (Galicia, never fertile in poets) is perhaps one of the best-known formulations of this idea, which has peppered many a description of Galicia and Galicians from a centralist viewpoint since the Spanish Golden Age.¹ That this negative stereotype was enjoying wide circulation at the time of Saralegui y Medina’s writing is demonstrated by the prolonged counterargument he included in his 1867 book. The conception that Galicians were unsuited for poetry may well have been, as Saralegui acknowledged, ‘la injuria que lastima, pero no es la amarga realidad que desconsuela’ (an injurious comment that may hurt, but not a bitter reality that causes despair) (120). In his attempt to dismantle the demeaning stereotype about Galicians about which ‘sueña la inmensa mayoría de los españoles’ (the vast majority of Spaniards dream) (120), the historian explains that, although the climate of the region is not perhaps most conducive to the ‘desarrollo de la imaginacion’ (development of the imagination) necessary for poetic inspiration (117), Galician oral traditions of sung celebrations and legend-telling prove that this is not ‘un pueblo á quien ha negado el cielo el divino don de la poesia y la aptitud para las artes liberales’ (a people to which the heavens have denied the divine gift of poetry and aptitude for the liberal arts) (117). Saralegui’s passages on this question show that the coordination between Galician identity and sentimentality had not yet been forged at the time of his writing:

De qué el génio poético no haya llegado á desarrollarse entre nosotros, por efecto de circunstancias que todos conocemos, se ha querido sacar la consecuencia de que la inspiracion y el sentimiento son incompatibles con nuestro caracter y con nuestro clima, como si bajo el cielo todavia màs nebuloso de Bretagne, hombres de nuestra misma raza y del mismo caracter que nosotros no hubieran dado á la Francia épocas enteras de verdadera gloria literaria … (1867: 115–16, emphasis mine)

(From the fact that poetic genius has not yet developed among us owing to circumstances which we all know, some have reached the conclusion that inspiration and sentiment are not compatible with our character and climate, as if under the Breton sky, which is even cloudier than ours, men of our race and character had not given France whole periods of true literary glory.)

Saralegui’s words above outline a fundamental discursive structure of colonial power play between Spain and Galicia: the notion of sentimentality was, in the decades before the political articulation of Galician nationalism, a desirable feature for Galicia’s national character profile, one which would conveniently help counteract Spanish stereotypical depictions